As electric and electronic features in vehicles become more common, the physical size and complexity of wiring harnesses connecting components increases. At the same time, the need for reliability at all levels of the system increases as more system critical functions are converted to electronic control. However, improving reliability often involves duplicating services, at the cost of increasing the size and complexity of vehicle wiring harnesses. This creates a particularly difficult problem in retrofit or re-manufacturing situations.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,594,500 uses double pole double throw switches to switch separate signals to one of two logic circuits to use in matching an incoming code sequence with a local address of a missile in a radar to missile link.
In order to reduce the size and complexity of vehicle wiring harnesses, particular in large construction, earthmoving, mining, paving, agricultural, etc. equipment, a data link bus such as a Controller Area Network bus (CAN bus) or other suitable data bus may be used to multiplex connections from multiple sources over a single wire, 2-wire or 4-wire network to a controller. The exemplary CAN bus was developed in the mid-1980's for in-vehicle and other data network applications.